Wordpress migration checklist for Bitnami without any plugins using the terminal

Intermediate

October 2022

This checklist has been written by me since I keep running into the same scenario over and over again during migrations where I forget a simple step and have to repeat everything again.

Think of this tutorial on how to perform migration of an existing Wordpress instance. This tutorial assumes you have knowledge of basic linux commands.

I will be using a Bitnami Wordpress installation on AWS EC2 to demonstrate. Login to your Wordpress instance and find the installation path of wordpress.

Bitnami Wordpress

My installation is located at /home/<username>/stack/wordpress .

Wordpress stores its data in 3 main places:

  1. /wp-content/ folder where all the plugins and theme files are located
  2. Database (usually mysql, mariadb or postgres) where data on authentication, users and website content
  3. wp-config.php where config details such as website URL and database credentials are located

Let's zip up the /wp-content/ folder so that it can be downloaded onto my computer

$~ zip -r ./wp-content wp-content.zip

Now lets connect to the database and back it up With the database credentials lets dump the SQL into a file

$~ mysqldump -u <username> -p <database_name> > backup.sql

Now lets download the backed up files onto our system using scp

$~ scp <username>@<ip>:/home/<username>/stack/wordpress/wp-content.zip ./
$~ scp <username>@<ip>:/home/<username>/stack/wordpress/wp-config.php ./
$~ scp <username>@<ip>:/home/<username>/stack/wordpress/backup.sql ./

While you're at it. Do not forget to check the version of php-fpm running since you cannot migrate from one version of PHP to another.

PHP Version check

This should lead to you have all the three important files

  1. wp-content.zip
  2. wp-config.php
  3. backup.sql

Now spin up another instance of wordpress while making sure to match the same PHP version.

New bitnami Installtion

SSH into the newly logged in instance and delete the following files to make sure they don't overlap.

  1. /home/<username>/stack/wordpress/wp-content
  2. /home/<username>/stack/wordpress/wp-config.php

Now lets upload the same file onto the server

$~ scp ./wp-content.zip <username>@<ip>:/home/<username>/stack/wordpress/wp-content.zip
$~ scp ./wp-config.php <username>@<ip>:/home/<username>/stack/wordpress/wp-config.php
$~ scp ./backup.sql <username>@<ip>:/home/<username>/stack/wordpress/backup.sql

Unzip the wp-content.zip folder

$~ unzip ./wp-content.zip

Replace the database credentials in the wp-config.php

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define( 'DB_NAME', 'bitnami_wordpress' );
/** Database username */
define( 'DB_USER', '<username>' );
/** Database password */
define( 'DB_PASSWORD', '<password>' );
/** Database hostname */
define( 'DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1:3306' );

Restore the sql backup back into the database

mysql -u <username> -p bitnami_wordpress < backup.sql

Your wordpress deployment should be ready and working.

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